Works in Progress
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Coda to "Dark Frontier". Chakotay was assigned to read the Hansens' logs while the Borg Queen was holding Seven prisoner. Pre-C/7.


Works in Progress

By Laura Schiller

Based on: _Star Trek: Voyager_

Copyright: Paramount

/

"Good evening, Seven. I thought you should have these back."

Chakotay's voice had gone flat, as it often did when he was uncomfortable. He never liked going down to Cargo Bay Two at the best of times. The low lighting and all the green-lit, whirring Borg technology made him edgy, and so did the woman who lived there. He liked it still less when he had to return a box of deeply personal documents to her and admit that he had read them without her permission.

Sure enough, she flushed with indignation as soon as she saw the container under his arm. Her eyes narrowed. "Why do you have the Hansens' logs?"

The Hansens. She couldn't even call them her parents? But that was beside the point right now. He placed the container on the floor next to her alcove, where several similar ones were stacked, and straightened up so he could meet those accusing eyes head-on. "The Captain ordered me to read them," he said. "After you … " _After you betrayed us, _he thought, _except you never did. After you gave up your life to protect us and we almost left you behind. _"While you were gone. I was to evaluate their research. That's where we came up with the bio-dampener the Captain used to get you out."

From a tactical point of view, Janeway's order made sense. If you wanted to rescue a prisoner out of a Borg sphere, who better to help plan it than a former Maquis who was used to being outnumbered, and who had personal experience with the Borg in the form of Riley Frazier's Cooperative?

All the same, he wished he'd never read those logs.

He had meant to focus only on the research and leave the personal notes alone, but they weren't so easy to separate. Doctors Magnus and Erin Hansen had been the kind of single-minded scientists whose field of study bled over into everything they wrote. As a fellow scientist, Chakotay was reluctantly impressed by their dedication. As a human being and Seven's colleague, however, those logs had given him chills.

_Confirmed – bio-dampener functions at full capacity. Live audiovisual feed from inside cube records dismantling of damaged drone & reduction to component parts (Query: how advanced is Borg medical technology & how much is enough damage to discard rather than repair?). _

_Annika calls the med-drone "Needlefingers" after the syringe in its arm. Glad to see her little face & Erin's on the bridge when I got back. Need to remember what human faces look like._

_She's having trouble sleeping. Wish I could help. _

_Erin says we should refuel before we follow that cube any further. But if we do, we might as well go home & she's right – we broke the law. _Raven_'s no place to raise a child, but neither is a prison colony._

They had let their six-year-old daughter watch an injured life form be killed and scavenged by its own shipmates. Great spirits, no wonder she couldn't sleep.

Chakotay thought of his own father, so committed to bringing back lost traditions, so mistrustful of modern technology, so rooted in one place. HYou couldn't imagine a man more different than Magnus Hansen – and yet, they had both pushed their children into lives they didn't want, and both had been lost before their children could forgive them.

"The bio-dampener … " Seven frowned at the container, and he could almost feel her efforts to channel whatever she was feeling into the neutral ground of scientific inquiry. "It should not have been as effective as it was. All the information in these logs was assimilated eighteen years ago."

"I know. I asked Lieutenant Torres to make some creative modifications. The last thing I'd want to do is underestimate the Borg."

"Unlike my parents, you mean." This time, Seven managed to say the word, but her tone was a strange blend of bitterness and sadness. She turned away from him, picked up the container with the logs and opened it, staring down into the rows of standard-issue padds with haunted eyes. "Their obsession with the Borg ruined our lives … and yet it also saved me. It is a paradox I find difficult to reconcile."

Chakotay bowed his head in agreement. He knew the paradoxes of family all too well.

"When I was twelve, my father took me hunting," he said. This wasn't a story he talked about often, at least not in detail, but something about her artless honesty invited him to do the same. Besides, if anyone would understand, it would be her.

"Ever try to gut an animal? It's messy. I got sick the first time I tried, and I got so angry with him. Such a waste, I said. Why bother, when we've got gardens and fields and even replicators? He said you never know when you might need this to survive. Technology breaks down, climates change, but knowledge is something no one can take from you. I still avoid eating real meat unless I have to … but wouldn't you know it, the old man had a point. What he taught me saved my life or my friends' lives more than once, in Starfleet, in the Maquis, then here. Which is ironic, since he never wanted me to leave home in the first place."

Seven clenched her teeth when he mentioned hunting – rather tactless, he realized, considering what she'd been through with the Hirogen – but as he spoke, her eyes began to slowly widen with understanding, or perhaps empathy.

"Are you grateful to him then?" she asked. "Or do you resent him?"

She waited intently for his answer, as if it might give her a clue about how to cope with her own memories. He wished he could tell her something wise and comforting, but all he had was the truth.

"Either. Both. I don't know."

Seven rifled through the padds slowly, the click of her metallic fingertips against the plastic the only sound aside from the ever-present hum of the alcoves. She didn't say a word. Chakotay wondered if he should leave, if this was her way of dismissing him – she still sometimes forgot such inefficient customs as greetings and goodbyes – until another look at her face made him stay. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, a muscle working in her cheek. Her eyes darted over to him, then away again. She wanted very much to tell him something, but didn't know where to start.

"What's the matter, Seven?"

"I saw my father."

That shocked him worse than anything in the logs. "You saw - ?"

" – the drone that was once my father, yes." Seven's voice had that flat, robotic quality that usually grated on his nerves, but right now, it was so clearly a defense mechanism that it only made him sad. "The Borg Queen presented him to me as an incentive for re-assimilation. When the Captain came for me, I had to leave him behind in order to escape. He … " The flat voice cracked and softened. "He did not recognize me … and my mother was not there."

The sight and sound of this normally composed woman becoming so vulnerable made Chakotay angrier than he'd felt in a long time. If he ever met the Borg Queen, he thought, remembering the descriptions of her in Seven's and the Captain's reports, he would sincerely enjoy finding out whether those detachable limbs still bled when you chopped them off. As for the Hansens, he'd have liked to give them a piece of his mind. Except it was useless to be angry with people long gone, whose bodies were still walking around without their souls.

"Damn," he said, "I'm sorry," knowing how deeply inadequate those words were, but having nothing else to give.

"I am aware of the impossibility of freeing them," Seven said. "No apologies necessary."

He had meant _I'm sorry_ in the sense of condolence, not apology, but either way, at least she seemed to understand that he would help if he could.

"People keep telling me to forgive my parents," she added, raising her human eyebrow in perplexity. "The Captain, the Doctor, even Mr. Neelix … what is your opinion, Commander? Do you agree?"

Chakotay felt he was the least suitable person to advise her about this, given his own family history. He also knew where their shipmates were coming from; Kathryn had lost one beloved relative, Neelix all of them, and the Doctor had never had any to begin with. But he also knew that moral lectures wouldn't help Seven; they certainly hadn't in his case.

"It's not my place to tell you what to think or how to feel, Seven. It's up to you."

She looked dismayed for a moment, but then her expression turned to relief. "That is useful to know, Commander. It can be difficult to decide whether one's emotions are correct."

_Correct. _There was something oddly pitiable about that, as if she worried that someone would make her sit an exam about her emotions and she might not pass. Seeing what the Borg had done to her was like looking at the plants in Aeroponics sometimes: beautiful things stuck in a cramped, unnatural environment, and yet still managing to blossom.

"It's that way for everyone," he said. "Believe me."

He'd struggled with enough 'incorrect' emotions in his life to know that.

"Have you forgiven _your_ father?" Seven asked, seeming to guess what he was thinking by a certain wry note in his voice.

Had he? He tried to recall Kolopak to memory: his long gray hair falling around his shoulders, the Web of Life tattooed on his wrinkled forehead, the exasperated _ach! _sound he sometimes let out when they argued, the smell of earth and pipe tobacco, his strong hands correcting his son's grip on a spear.

Sometimes in his vision quests, Chakotay ran through the jungle after his father for ages and couldn't find him. Sometimes the old man berated him until he was ready to either attack or cry. Sometimes he was a little boy again and his father picked him up and carried him, and those were almost the worst, because it was such a let-down to come back to the real world. His mother had been the peacemaker between them, but she had fallen ill and died when he was a boy, and sometimes, illogically enough, he was angry with her too for leaving them alone.

He wondered if his sister Sekaya felt the same way. Maybe not; she had less to feel guilty about. He wished he knew how she was coping on her own, sixty thousand lightyears away.

"I think the more relevant question would be whether I've forgiven myself," he said.

"And have you?"

"I'm working on it," was all he could honestly say.

She contemplated this for a long moment, standing still as a statue with the light from a nearby alcove flickering across her face and hair. He wondered whether she would find it 'incorrect' for him to notice how beautiful she was when her stern face softened in thought.

"Then I shall work on it as well," she said. "Thank you, Commander."

"For what? I've done nothing."

"For these."

She picked up one of her parents' logs, switched it on, and – unceremoniously, without even sitting down - began to read.

Chakotay, recognizing the end of the conversation, left the room. As soon as the cargo bay doors closed behind him, he leaned against the wall for a moment, feeling emotionally and mentally tired as he often did after a run-in with Seven. Talking to Kathryn had become relatively simple over the years; they could banter and tease and debate ship's policy while leaving the important things unsaid. Not Seven. She was all or nothing when it came to communication, and she expected the same out of him.

If someone fell in love with her, for instance, and tried to tell her in the form of a made-up ancient legend, she would probably fix those electric blue eyes on them and tell them to clarify. It would take a very brave person indeed to meet those eyes in a moment like that.

It was just as well they weren't too close, he decided as he made his way to the turbolift. Making a habit of conversations like this one would drain him dry.

_Or they might do you a world of good, boy,_ said that wry, elderly voice in the back of his head that sounded like his father. _You never know._


End file.
